Effective academic writing is accessible to readers because writers follow shared conventions for organization and signal their stance on particular topics; however, few specifics are known about how middle graders might develop knowledge of and use these academic language forms and functions to signal their organization and stance in persuasive…

This program profile examines efforts by WPAs at York College, a senior college in the CUNY system, to adapt to externally imposed changes and develop a locally meaningful writing program. 1999 marked the end of remediation at four-year (senior) colleges in The City University of New York. The elimination of developmental writing at CUNY's senior…

A writing-intensive, upper-level undergraduate course which integrates content, context, collaboration, and communication in a unique fashion, is described. The topic of the seminar is "Scientific Writing in Chemistry" and an assignment-based curriculum was developed to instruct students on best practices in all aspects of science…

Each disciplinary community has its own criteria for determining what counts as evidence of knowledge in their academic field. The criteria influence the ways that a community's knowledge is created, communicated, and evaluated. Situating reading, writing, and language instruction within the content areas enables teachers to explicitly…

The current study used a pretest-posttest randomized control group design with 73 Head Start students, ages 3-5 years. The researcher served as the interactive writing teacher for the treatment group, rotating to five different classrooms in one Head Start center 3-4 days a week for 13 weeks. Children in the treatment group received a 10-15 min…

The term "genre" first came into the field of second-language (L2) writing and, in turn, the field of English for specific purposes (ESP) in the 1980s, with the research of John Swales, first carried out in the UK, into the introduction section of research articles. Other important figures in this area are Tony Dudley-Evans, Ann Johns…

Teaching scientific writing in biology classes is challenging for both students and instructors. This article offers and reviews several useful "toolkit" items that improve student writing. These include sentence and paper-length templates, funnelling and compartmentalisation, and preparing compendiums of corrections. In addition,…

Lecturers are challenged when creating safe, dialogic-educative spaces for first-year students (freshman), where optimal teaching-learning of academic writing can be accomplished. This paper reports on a project aimed at creating a safe, dialogic-educative space in which first-year students may attain and practice academic writing skills providing…

In this article, the author presents two snapshots that document how No Child Left Behind (NCLB) influenced her writing instruction. She uses Dewey's concept of inquiry to frame the disastrous effects that high-stakes testing can have on the students with the greatest needs. Finally, she looks ahead to consider how the Common Core text exemplars…

The present study investigates if there is a positive effect of the use of concept mapping software on students with Attention Deficit (AD) when learning descriptive writing in the secondary level of education. It also examines what kind of difficulties AD students may have come across during this learning procedure. Sample students were selected…

Few studies have investigated how metacognitive processes foster the application of genre knowledge to students' academic writing. This is largely due to its internal and unobservable characteristics. To bridge this gap, an online writing system based on metacognition, involving the stages of planning, monitoring, evaluating, and revising, was…

In the L2 writing literature, there has been a rich history of scholarship in theory, research and practice since the 1960s. Two of the most prominent L2 writing approaches are process and portfolio pedagogy. The former approach promotes the use of diverse writing strategies (e.g. pre-writing) to enhance student writers' expression and fluency.…

The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of using collaborative techniques and activities on EFL students' writing performance. A total of 35 low-intermediate EFL students ranging from 15 to 18 years-of-age participated in this investigation. These participants were assigned into two groups: An experimental group (N = 17) in which…

This study reports on the insights from an EFL learner corpora (a total of 151 essays and 49,690 words) generated from essays collected over the years in a Turkish state university from freshmen students enrolling in the Advanced Writing course. The comparison of cohesive devices in the non-native corpus (NNC) with those in a native corpus (NC)…

Purpose: This paper reports a study that investigated the interactions of six students learning to write narrative essays on an online narrative writing platform (ONWP). Participants were six students and a teacher from an urban Chinese Secondary School in the northern region of Malaysia. Methodology: The qualitative data used in this study were…